But what if the franchise is based on building your own Warhammer 40k character and the Disney characters available really do suck? Is one then supposed to pretend that they're super good, because otherwise one is being negative?
There's a time and a place. The thread wasn't: "What do you think about the Origin characters?"
It's in the general section of the forum. The thread title immediately gives someone the impression that it's a place where they can come and share their enthusiasm and excitement.
Instead, it's an uncomfortable environment where what they like just keeps getting defecated on by the same usual suspect posters who have coughed up more hate and venom in more threads than I have time to count.
The question was why would it be considered rude to do that?
My reply wasn't that someone shouldn't be allowed to do it. My reply was simply explaining exactly what was rude about it.
A place where community enthusiasm is shut down so haters can once again monopolize the conversation. In my opinion.
You do come off with "an attitude", though...
What I come off as is someone with a different opinion than yours.
...but there's a certain feeling that some of us simply being critical of Larian is rubbing you the wrong way.
No. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Even me.
That said, you're probably picking up on how unimpressed I am with some of the opinions I'm hearing. Specifically, opinions that are masquerading as fact.
Also, you're not just posting your opinion, you're posting your hope, and your hope is literally that all of us who want to make our own characters get to have a worse experience.
I have no idea what you're talking about.
My hope doesn't enter into it.
I've said that I think Origin characters will naturally be more interesting due to the nature of the beast. Meaning that since the writers know the Origin characters, then the writers are capable of providing a story that fits those characters well.
As opposed to writers dancing around a nebulous character that only really lives inside the player's head. And with millions of players, well, that's a lot of shifting personalities fitting into Tav's boots.
I don't hope you have a bad experience. I'm engaging in an intellectual discussion about writing a story featuring a main character who gets to interact within the confines of the narrative. Again, I don't have hopes for your experience one way or the other. I can't even imagine why you would think that, and really, truly, honestly, the fact that I have to explain that is tiresome. This is not a difficult concept to parse, in my opinion.
As for your point 3, customized characters are not simply about "being better" but about being the logical center of a story. The player is controlling the party so it stands to reason that the player character is the party leader. But why is that the case? Why is Mystra's boy toy, a weirdo vampire spawn that isn't following vampire spawn rules, a chosen of Mystra, a hyper-racist Gith, and a local folk hero all bending the knee to Tav the total nobody? Why would any of them bend the knee to any of the other origin characters, for that matter?
There's no "reason," at least of the "in-game" variety. It's all a conceit of the video game, and disbelief has to be suspended.
The practical reason it works this way is because the developers want to satisfy the ego of the players. In general, the player wants to feel like they're making the decisions, and in reality, the player actually is making the decisions for the companions, and so... Tav becomes the leader.
This is the way it works in countless games. There's a little push back, of course. There's a system that tries to quantify whether the companions like or dislike Tav. And if things go too far in certain directions, you'll see companions leave.
Personally, I don't like that the player character is almost always in charge. I don't like chosen one plot lines, and I think the suggestion that Tav needs to be a little more special than the other companions is unhealthy, weak, and cringe. I don't like it at all; in fact, that level of ego need makes me enormously uncomfortable.
Lastly, your arguments aren't all that well-reasoned, in my opinion. Arguing that D&D isn't about rolling your own character and that going pregen is totally a common thing does not appear to be sufficiently supported. My observation is that a dramatic majority of people have a different experience of what D&D is. Look around the internet too. There's plenty of advice for how to make your character but I don't seem to find places that exist to provide lots and lots of cool pregen characters that people can just use cookie cutter style for their campaigns. Build guides, sure, but full characters? Not so much.
My argument is well reasoned. Yours however...
Let's start by establishing what the argument was about. Someone said, roughly, "DnD is all about playing your own character as opposed to playing someone else's character."
Now, no one is arguing that playing your own character isn't a part of what DnD is about. No one, literally no one, has said that people don't play their own characters in DnD.
But you just made an entire argument supporting that people do, indeed, play their own characters in DnD. A big argument insisting on a point that no one ever disagreed about.
The question was whether or not DnD was also about playing pregenerated characters. And the answer to that is unequivocally yes. It's *also* about playing pregenerated characters. Because it's about playing characters, and how you get your character isn't up for judgment.
Heck, even you admit to build guides in your comment. There are a lot of build guides being used, and let's not pretend everyone of those players using a build guide took the time to build a personality to go along with the numbers. Plenty of "Bob the sniper" characters out there.
However, a lot of people are happy to talk endlessly about their own characters that they created and had fun with. Why do you think this is so?
Because people like to talk about things they're preoccupied with.
Basically, everyone loves to talk about the character they came up with, but not many people want to hear about it. Have you ever heard that saying before? It's true. Largely because most of those characters kind of suck. They don't have interesting stories and backgrounds for the most part. Sure, there are some exceptions, but most of them suck.
But you know what a lot of people like hearing about? Stories written by professionals. Because those stories don't suck. Again, there are exceptions, but we're talking on average here.
And isn't it reasonable to want some of that feeling in a computerised D&D experience?
I can *want* the writers to cater to my custom character all day long, sure. I got lots of wants.
